James Swallow: Ghost in the Shell: The Official Movie Novelization

“ Awaiting instructions. ”

“ Review and report .” The dour, resonant voice seemed to be conjured out of the air itself, perfectly clear despite the moaning winds across the Maciej’s rooftop.

The chief’s words formed directly in the Major’s auditory nerve matrix, rendered silent and encrypted by one of the many neural modules beneath the surface of her skin. Even through the non-vocal link, the voice carried the same cadence as ever; every word precise, every sentence cut exactly to length. In all her time serving under Daisuke Aramaki’s command as a field operative for the Public Security Section Nine counter-terrorism unit, the Major had rarely heard the steely old man raise his voice. There had never been the need. She’d also never heard him speak anything other than Japanese, either aloud or through the comms. He did not require that others respond to him in Japanese, only that he be understood in his own words. This was not an issue for the Major. She couldn’t remember whether the language was something she already knew in her previous life or had been added to her linguistic skills as part of a cyber implant, but her Japanese was as flawless as her English.

Sixty floors below, a geisha bot in a floor-length red kimono, bound by a golden sash, made her way down one of the many corridors of the luxury Maciej Hotel. The floor was lit from beneath, a pattern of white rectangles outlined in black. One wall was covered in a curtain with a gold and black motif of water.

The geisha bot swayed gracefully as she moved. Like the décor, her appearance was meant to conjure the Japan of centuries past, but she was not meant to be mistaken for a human. Her faceplate was a painted feminine mask, glossy milk white with a perfect circle of pink that encompassed the area between her mid-forehead and lower lip. Darker pink eyebrows were painted at the top of the circle, and a small vertical rectangle of crimson marked the exact center of her mouth. Her hair was black lacquer, fanned out in the back with one section that rose up and two that framed her face. Her eyes were black and held no expression.

The geisha bot entered the wide space of a banquet room. This, too, was in the style of old Japan. Here, another geisha bot played the strings of a quiet samisen, picking out a melancholy, traditional tune, long alabaster fingers never missing a single motion as they travelled up and down the neck of the stringed instrument. Her head turned this way and that. She and the other geisha bots in service, all identical in form, had variations in the pink patterns on their masks, but all were clad in black kimonos—except for the one in red who had just arrived.

Human hostesses would have been completely superfluous here, as no one in the room would have cared to interact with them in any case. Bots not only suited the purpose, but the theme of the gathering; after all, the meeting in the banquet room was all about tech.

The executives of Hanka in their expensive suits and the delegates from the West African Federation in their brightly hued robes sat cross-legged on floor mats on either side of a long, low wooden table. They laughed and conversed, eating their expensive meal with chopsticks as the synthetic servants walked among them, topping up their sake and tea bowls from cast-iron kettles.

The red-clad geisha sat down behind Dr. Paul Osmond. He took no notice of her. Lean and gravel-voiced, Osmond was the head of Hanka’s robotics division, far too preoccupied to even look round as he held up his bowl for a refill. His dark silk jacket was a trifle too large; the stress of trying to get this deal in place had taken its toll on his sleep and appetite. Osmond kept his attention fixed on the visitors he had worked so very hard to bring here. The geisha drifted away and he took a sip of sake, savoring the bitter taste, and continued his conversation. “I’m human, I’m flawed,” Osmond confessed to the assemblage. “But I embrace change… and enhancement. Now there’s nothing I can’t do. Nothing… nothing I can’t know. Nothing I can’t be.”

Osmond turned purposefully to the West African Federation’s president. The man’s shaved head and unlined face, framed by a neat beard, made his age difficult to judge. The president’s turquoise blue and saffron robes suggested that he was open to colorful possibilities; the dark implants at both temples proclaimed that the man was definitely in favor of cyber-enhancement; the fragrant, half-smoked cigar he gestured with in his right hand said he was a connoisseur of fine things.

Osmond took all of these as good signs. “I want you to listen to something,” he told the president.

Pressing a thumb-pad that shone with golden light, Osmond sent impulses through the president’s transparent cyber-enhancement lines, which lit up with a series of blue flashes as information was transmitted directly into his brain.

The president closed his eyes to concentrate, smiling at what he heard. A little English girl sang a few bars from a classic French song. “Au clair de la lune/Mon ami Pierrot…”

“That’s my four-year-old daughter,” Osmond explained. “In the time it took her to sing that lullaby, she learned to speak fluent French.”

The president opened his eyes and leant forward, smiling at Osmond. Osmond felt his confidence increase. He tried to keep his mind on the business at hand, instead of thinking ahead to the promotion this contract would net him, and of the salary bump that would come with it.

The Major heard Osmond trying to be cool and conversational through an echo box, a type of cavity resonator used to test and adjust radar equipment by bouncing a signal between the transmitter and the receiver. “Did you know that song was the earliest known recording?”

The Major’s mental databases immediately referred her to what was being referenced—a voice singing “Au Clair de la Lune” had been made on a phonautograph, the earliest known device for recording sound, in 1860, by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. What she was hearing, however, concerned her far less than how she was hearing it. The presence of the device was unexpected, and therefore suspicious.

“ There’s an echo box ,” she told Aramaki over the comms. The Major opened her kit. One end of the serpentine zeta-cable within presented six jacks that snapped smartly into sockets on the base of the echo box, and the other spooled around her wrist, almost as if it were alive. She took it between her fingers and reached up to the back of her neck, folding away her hair to access her quik-ports. The zeta-cable, made from a smart polymer configured for ultrahigh density data transfer, whispered into her dermal receiver ports and clicked home with a soft sigh.

She stiffened slightly as her neural software made the interface with the echo box and the Maciej Hotel’s security network. Military-grade digital incursion programs made short work of the rudimentary countermeasures protecting the illegal tech.

The president of the West African Federation apparently had the same information about the recording as the Major did. She heard him say, “Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville…”

Computer information was being moved across a network, the Major concluded, and it wasn’t her team. “ Someone’s scanning data traffic ,” she reported.

Aramaki’s command came back over the comm. “ Trace where it’s transmitting .”

The Major wanted to visually identify the conversation she overheard through the echo box. “ Let’s see who’s worth this kind of surveillance .” She knew the comms would carry her words to the rest of Section Nine. She lowered her virtual reality headset and focused it on the Maciej Hotel. Within milliseconds, the Major was seeing the live feeds from the Maciej’s embedded cameras that the device had intercepted. This in turn allowed her to scan through every room in the hotel, private or public, searching for where the unit was transmitting. “ Accessing hotel security network .”